TITLE: Seas of Titan
NAME: Gail Shaw
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: gshaw@monotix.co.za
WEBPAGE: http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za
TOPIC: Seas
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: titan.jpg
ZIPFILE: titan.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.5a

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhinocerous 1.1 Demo
            Leveller 1.4
            Paint Shop Pro 5

RENDER TIME: 
    5 hours 24 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 450Mhz 128 MB Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Earth may not be the only body in the solar system with liquid seas. Current
scientific
theory postulates the existence of seas of ethane on Titan (Saturn's largest
moon)
Titan is the only moon with an atmosphere thicker than earth's (1.6 times
thicker)
The atmosphere is primarily hydrogen and methane. Surface temperature is in the
region of -170 degrees C.

A detailed study of the surface of Titan is planned using the huygens probe

The silver things in the foreground? Well what if there's life on Titan, using
Saturn's
magnetic field for energy....


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I spend a good period of time getting the atmosphere looking right. The horizon
is
built up using two different ground fogs, although the variation doesn't show as
well as
I would have liked. I used a large transparent inverse sphere to contain the fog
as without
that the stars and saturn look as though they are within the atmosphere.

The terrain in the foreground is made up of heightfields created in leveller.
The liquid
surface is also height fields, this time created using Pov-Ray and PaintShop
Pro.

The texture is a simple slope map (MegaPov feature) with rock on the steeper
slopes
and 'snow' on the flatter. 

Once the foreground looked reasonable I worked on the far background. The stars
are spheres
at a massive distance. 

The rings of Saturn were created using an include file by Sigmund Kyrre Aas
based on data
by Bj_rn J_nsson. The saturn texture is an image map. (I think that map also
came from
Bj_rn J_nsson's web site)

The meteors are emitting media, contained by a merge of a sphere and a cone.

The distant mountains are isosurfaces (Ridged MultiFractals) with the same
texture as the
front height fields.

The odd silvery things were modelled in Rhino, exported as a povray mesh then
run through
Warp's mesh compressor. I tried adding hair on them, but it didn't look too
good, so I left them
as is.

There are three lights in the scene. 1 main light (Sun), a dim light simulating
the sunlight
that Saturn reflects, then a shadowless fill light.

